Peter Thiel’s Palantir poses a grave menace to Individuals | Robert Reich

[ad_1] Draw a circle round all of the property within the US now dedicated to synthetic intelligence.

Draw a second circle round all of the property dedicated to the US army.

A 3rd round all property being dedicated to serving to the Trump regime acquire and compile private info on hundreds of thousands of Individuals.

And a fourth circle across the components of Silicon Valley devoted to turning the US away from a democracy right into a dictatorship led by tech bros.

The place do the 4 circles intersect?

At an organization known as Palantir Applied sciences and a person named Peter Thiel.

In JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a “palantír” is a seeing stone that can be utilized to distort fact and current selective visions of actuality. In the course of the Warfare of the Ring, a palantír falls underneath the management of Sauron, who makes use of it to control and deceive.

Palantir Applied sciences bears a placing similarity. It sells an AI-based platform that enables its customers – amongst them, army and legislation enforcement companies – to investigate private knowledge, together with social media profiles, private info and bodily traits. These are used to establish and surveil people.

In March, Trump signed an government order requiring all companies and departments of the federal authorities to share knowledge on Individuals. To get the job executed, Trump selected Palantir Applied sciences.

Palantir is now poised to mix knowledge gleaned from the Division of Homeland Safety, the Division of Protection, the Division of Well being and Human Companies, the Social Safety Administration and the Inner Income Service. In the meantime, the administration desires entry to residents’ and others’ checking account numbers and medical claims.

Will the Trump regime use an rising super-database to advance Trump’s political agenda, discover and detain immigrants, and punish critics? Will it make it simpler for Trump to spy on and goal his ever-growing record of enemies and different Individuals? We’ll quickly discover out.

13 former Palantir workers signed a letter this month urging the company to cease its work with Trump.

Linda Xia, who was a Palantir engineer till final 12 months, stated the issue was not with the corporate’s expertise however with how the Trump administration supposed to make use of it. “Combining all that knowledge, even with the noblest of intentions, considerably will increase the chance of misuse,” she instructed the New York Occasions.

Even some Republicans are involved. Consultant Warren Davidson, a Republican of Ohio, instructed Semafor such work may very well be “harmful”: “While you begin combining all these knowledge factors on a person into one database, it actually basically creates a digital ID. And it’s an influence that historical past says will ultimately be abused.”

Final week, a gaggle of Democratic lawmakers despatched a letter to Palantir, asking for solutions about big authorities contracts the corporate obtained. The lawmakers are fearful that Palantir helps make a super-database of Individuals’ personal info.

Behind their fear lie a number of people who find themselves behind Palantir’s choice for the venture, beginning with Elon Musk.

Musk’s so-called “division of presidency effectivity” (Doge) was behind Palantir’s choice. A minimum of three Doge members had labored at Palantir, the Occasions reported, whereas others had labored at corporations funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founding father of Palantir, who nonetheless holds a significant stake in it.

Thiel has labored carefully with Musk, who devoted 1 / 4 of a billion {dollars} to getting Trump re-elected after which, as head of Doge, helped eviscerate swaths of the federal government with out congressional authority.

Thiel additionally mentored JD Vance, who labored for Thiel at certainly one of his enterprise funds. Thiel subsequently bankrolled Vance’s 2022 senatorial marketing campaign. Thiel launched Vance to Trump and later helped Vance change into his vice-presidential choose.

Thiel additionally mentored the billionaire David Sacks, who additionally labored with Thiel at PayPal. As a scholar at Stanford College, Sacks wrote for the Stanford Overview, the rightwing scholar newspaper Thiel based as an undergraduate there in 1987. Sacks is now Trump’s “AI and crypto czar”.

The CEO of Palantir is Alex Karp, who stated on an earnings name earlier this 12 months that the corporate desires “to disrupt and make the establishments we companion with the perfect on the planet and, when it’s mandatory, to scare enemies and occasionally kill them”.

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Palantir lately disclosed that Karp obtained $6.8bn in “compensation really paid” in 2024 (you learn that proper) – making him the highest-paid chief government of a publicly traded firm in the US.

A former era of rich US conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater as a result of they needed to preserve American establishments.

However this group – Thiel, Musk, Sacks, Karp and Vance, amongst others – doesn’t appear to wish to preserve a lot of something, not less than not something that occurred after the Nineteen Twenties, together with social safety, civil rights and even girls’s proper to vote.

As Thiel has written:

The Nineteen Twenties have been the final decade in American historical past throughout which one may very well be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the huge improve in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to girls – two constituencies which might be notoriously powerful for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.

Howdy?

If “capitalist democracy” is changing into an oxymoron, it’s not due to public help or as a result of girls obtained the best to vote. It’s as a result of billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy.

Not by the way, the Nineteen Twenties marked the final gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off a lot of the nation’s wealth that the remainder of the US needed to go deep into debt each to take care of their way of life and to take care of general demand for the products and companies the nation produced.

When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we obtained the Nice Melancholy. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the fashionable world had ever witnessed.

If the US realized something from the primary Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a most cancers within the Thirties, it ought to have been that gross inequalities of earnings and wealth gasoline abuses of political energy – as Trump, Musk, Thiel, Karp and different oligarchs have placed on full show – which in flip generate strongmen who destroy each democracy and freedom.

The hazard inherent in Palantir’s AI-powered super-database on all Individuals is related to the huge wealth and energy of these related to the company, and their obvious disdain for democratic establishments.

Had you walked to the top of Trump’s military-birthday parade and gazed above the president’s reviewing stand, you’d have seen on a large video board an commercial for Palantir – one of many chief sponsors of the occasion.

Tolkien’s palantír fell underneath the management of Sauron. Thiel’s Palantir is falling underneath the management of Trump. How this story ends is as much as all of us.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public coverage emeritus on the College of California, Berkeley. He's a Guardian US columnist. His publication is at robertreich.substack.com